Ashley Mallett,courtesy of CRICKET MONTHLY and ESPNcricinfo where the title of this article is “Bradman as a Boy”

At Bowral Primary School in the summer of 1915-16, Don Bradman, not yet eight years old, built a reputation as a cricketer. When the bell tolled to end another school day, Bradman didn’t dally to chat with others. In a desperate rush to get home, he ran helter-skelter through the small township of Bowral, turned into Shepherd Street, hurdled a white picket fence, breezed through his front door, and tossing his school bag in the hall and grabbing his cricket bat, yelled, “C’mon Mum, how about bowling me down a few?” Emily Bradman smiled. She discarded her apron, shifted the kettle on the stove and dutifully followed her son into the backyard. As Mrs Bradman wheeled down her own brand of left-arm deliveries, she could never have imagined that the small boy facing her at the other end of the back lawn would one day become the greatest batsman the world has known.

Bradman at 21, about to set sail for the 1930 Ashes, with a trophy for his world-record 452 made earlier in the year

Andrew Fidel Fernando, in ESPNcricinfo, 19 April 2017, where the title runs “Why is SLC in public-relations overdrive?” … and the by-line urns: “Thilanga Sumathipala’s board has done as much for Sri Lanka’s cricket as any other, but the chairman’s desperation for the limelight does them no favours;”

Five men stand in front of the sponsors’ backdrop at the presentation that follows Sri Lanka’s T20 win over Bangladesh. Four of them are holding cheques; the man who holds nothing is Thilanga Sumathipala, SLC president and unelected deputy speaker of the House. He stands closest to the presenter, and his presence seems gratuitous at first. When proceedings begin, however, it becomes clear that the camera is smitten with Sumathipala and that he is smitten with it. When Kusal Perera comes up to be interviewed about his Player-of-the-Match performance, there Sumathipala is, looking paternally over the player’s shoulder with a benevolent grin. While other awards are being handed out, the camera may stray, but as if bound by fate, it always has a way of finding its way back to Sumathipala. It captures his coy smirks and his firm handshakes. Read the rest of this entry ?

Benjamin Colby, courtesy of The CRICKET MONTHLY, October 2016, and ESPNcricinfo, where the title runs “The greatest cricketer who never lived” … In the first of a series on cricket in fiction, a look at Chinaman, in which the game isn’t so much plot driver as plinth

There is more cricket fiction than is probably thought to exist. Screeds of it, in fact, with a curious abundance of thrillers and murder mysteries stretching from Dorothy Sayers’ Oxford Blue amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey to Ted Dexter’s Testkill. As is often the case with artistry, novelists tackle cricket in a manner one might not otherwise think up. “How different would English summers be without slip fielders?” Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3 contemplates. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spedegue’s Dropper has a schoolteacher bowling 50 feet upward for the ball to fall vertically onto the stumps. Anthologies of cricket’s gilded writings tend toward literary pedigree, such as All-Muggleton’s jolly trouncing of Dingley Dell in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. Evergreen in the game, too, is celebrating an England of green fields surely more emerald than ever was the case in life. Upstanding here is the nostalgic village-cricket schmaltz of Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match ….Shehan Karunatillaka-Pic by Alamy … http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-shehan-karunatilaka-sri-lanka-born-author-who-won-the-commonwealth-40676969.html